He climbed down carefully, his muscles aching with the familiar strain.
The reaction started as soon as he left his usual nocturnal routes. A woman drawing water from a public pump saw him and stepped back quickly, making a warding sign with her fingers. Two children chasing a ragged ball stopped dead and stared until an older sibling hurried over and pulled them away, shooting him a venomous glare.
He kept his head down, letting his matted hair fall over his face like a curtain. The hostility was a physical pressure against his skin, no different from the wind. He was used to it.
He followed the main thoroughfare that led toward the western gate, a wide dirt road churned to mud by cart traffic and feet. The press of bodies grew thicker as he approached the towering stone archway. The gate itself was open, but flanked by four city guards in polished leather armor.
Momen's heart hammered against his ribs. This was it. They would stop him. They would ask for his pass or his business, and he had neither.
He hung back for a moment, watching the flow. A farmer drove a wagon of turnips through after a brief chat with a guard who knew him by name. A pair of merchants with packs argued about tariffs with another guard, finally handing over some coins before being waved through. A laundress with a basket on her hip walked past without even being glanced at.
They weren't checking everyone. They were checking for trouble, for contraband, for people who looked like they didn't belong.
He took a breath that did nothing to calm him and stepped into the stream of traffic, keeping close behind a group of noisy laborers returning from a shift outside the walls. He kept his eyes fixed on the muddy ground just ahead of their boots. The world narrowed to the crunch of gravel underfoot and the smell of sweat and dirt.
He passed under the shadow of the gate arch. The temperature seemed to drop a few degrees in the stone-cooled shade. He expected a hand on his shoulder, a shouted command.
None came.
One moment he was in the slums, the next, he was inside Terrasol.
The difference was immediate.
The track became cobblestones underfoot instead of mud. Buildings were proper structures with glass windows.
And it was clean. The air smelled of baked bread from somewhere nearby, of horses and stone dust and something faintly floral. People walked with purpose here. Their clothes were patched sometimes, but they were whole garments-tunics, trousers dresses in faded but discernible colors-not rags stitched together from twenty different sources.
He realized he had stopped walking just past the gatehouse.
The stares began immediately.
They were different from the slum-dwellers' looks of hatred or superstitious fear. These were stares of pure disdain. Of disgusted curiosity.
A man in a decent woolen cloak wrinkled his nose as he passed, giving Momen a wide berth as if fearing contamination.
A woman carrying a basket covered her produce with a cloth when she saw him.
Two girls in clean aprons whispered to each other behind their hands, their eyes following him with a kind of horrified fascination.
He became aware of every hole and stain on his clothes.
In the slums,
his filth was part of the landscape.
Here,
it was an obscenity,
a deliberate affront.
He could smell himself too now,
the ripe,
unwashed odor cutting through the city scents.
It announced him blocks before he arrived.
His face burned.
He wanted to shrink,
to disappear into the cracks between the cobblestones.
Instead,
he forced one foot in front of the other,
his head bowed so low his chin nearly touched his chest.
The clean stones stretched out before him.
The question *why* thrummed in time with his footsteps,
louder now,
demanding an answer this place would never give.
He kept walking,
deeper into the city,
with no destination except away from where he came from.
Even if it hurt more
to see what you could never have
than to simply never know it existed
The street opened into a square with a public fountain. The sight of clear, running water in the open, not hoarded or fought over, was so alien it made him pause again. He stood at the edge of the square, a dark smudge against the pale stone buildings.
He was so focused on the water, on the sheer normalcy of it all, that he didn't see the figure stepping out from a side street to his left. He was still looking down, his view limited to the cobbles and the boots of passersby.
He walked directly into a solid wall of polished metal.
The impact wasn't violent, but it was total. He bounced off with a dull clang, his balance gone. He landed hard on his backside on the cobblestones, the breath knocked out of him in a pained grunt. For a second, the world was just bright spots and the ache in his tailbone.
A shadow fell over him.
Momen looked up, blinking. Sunlight glared off plate armor so meticulously clean it seemed to glow. A knight. The armor was steel, engraved with subtle geometric patterns at the edges. A deep blue cloak was clasped at one shoulder. The man wearing it was tall, his face stern but not unkind beneath a helmet he carried tucked under one arm. His hair was cropped short, brown and neat.
The knight looked down at him, his expression one of mild, impersonal concern. Not anger. Not disgust.
"Are you alright?"
The voice was calm. Clear. It cut through the dull roar of the square and the buzzing in Momen's own head.
Momen couldn't speak. His throat had closed up. He just stared, still sprawled on the ground. The knight waited a beat, then did something impossible.
He extended his right hand, gauntlet removed, offering it to help him up.
Momen's eyes darted from the face to the hand. The hand was clean, the nails trimmed. It was a strong hand, with a few faint scars across the knuckles. It hung there in the air between them, an offer.
No one had ever offered him a hand. Not once in sixteen years. Hands were for hitting, for pushing, for throwing things. Hands snatched away food or covered children's eyes. They made warding signs. They did not extend in aid.
This was wrong. This had to be a trick. A cruel joke before the beating started. He braced himself, his muscles coiling to scramble away.
But the knight just waited. His gaze was steady. There was no mockery in it, no hidden malice that Momen could detect. It was the look of a man performing a simple duty-helping someone who had fallen. The knight's other hand rested casually on the pommel of his sword, but it wasn't a threatening posture. It just was.
The kindness wasn't personal. That was what made it so shocking. It wasn't because he was Momen. It was because he was a person who had fallen down in front of a knight, and knights helped people. It was automatic, a reflex trained by honor and code.
In that moment, Momen saw something he had no words for. It was in the straight line of the knight's back, in the quiet assurance of his stance, in the simple, clean act of offering assistance without a second thought. It was pride, but not the arrogant kind. It was a pride that came from knowing exactly who you were and what you stood for. It was honor made visible.
This man lived in light. He walked these clean stones not as an intruder but as their protector. He belonged here utterly, and his presence made the space around him feel ordered and safe, even for a filthy outcast on the ground.
The contrast was so violent it felt like a physical blow. This man was everything Momen was not: clean, strong, purposeful, respected. And he had just shown him a sliver of decency anyway.
Momen's own filth felt suddenly unbearable, a crushing weight. Shame hotter than any anger washed through him. He couldn't touch that clean hand. His own were black with grime, nails broken and packed with dirt. To put his stain on that knight's skin would be a worse crime than any he'd ever committed.
He scrambled backwards on his hands and heels like a crab, his boots scraping on the stone. He got his feet under him and stood in a clumsy rush, never taking his eyes off the knight.
The knight lowered his hand slowly, his brow furrowing slightly in confusion. "You're not hurt?" he asked again, his tone still neutral.
Momen opened his mouth. Nothing came out but a dry click of air. He shook his head violently, a jerky, animal motion.
Then he ran.
He turned and bolted back the way he had come, shoving past a startled merchant and ducking around a woman with a water jug. He didn't look back. His heart pounded against his ribs, not from exertion but from a tumult of emotions he couldn't name-terror, shame, and something else, something bright and painful that felt like looking directly at the sun.
Behind him, Sir Thos watched the ragged figure disappear into the flow of traffic near the gate. The boy moved with a desperate, feral speed. Thos's momentary concern faded into mild puzzlement, then indifference. A slum kid, lost and scared, probably stolen something and feared reprisal. A common enough sight, sadly.
Part of his duty was to keep order,
but chasing down every frightened urchin who didn't know how to accept help was pointless.
He had rounds to complete.
He adjusted his cloak,
the moment already fading from his mind into the background noise of his day.
He continued across the square,
his polished armor gleaming,
a symbol of stability in a city that functioned precisely because men like him did their jobs without unnecessary drama.
Momen didn't stop running until he was through the gate,
back in the familiar stench and chaos of the slums.
He finally collapsed against a wall in a narrow,
deserted alley,
gasping for breath.
He slid down to sit in the mud,
hugging his knees.
The image wouldn't leave him.
The sun on that armor.
The offered hand.
The calm voice asking if he was alright.
No one had ever asked if he was alright.
His whole life,
the answer had been so obviously *no*
that the question had never occurred to anyone,
least of all himself.
But that knight…
he hadn't seen the curse,
the filth,
the matricide.
Or if he had,
it hadn't mattered in that specific moment.
What mattered was the code:
you see someone fall,
you offer your hand.
That was all.
That code,
that pride…
it wasn't something you were born with.
It was something you *did*.
Something you chose to be.
The knight wore it like his armor,
and it made him untouchable by the filth around him,
even when it literally crashed into him.
A strange,
tight feeling built in Momen's chest.
It wasn't hope-hope was too soft a word for this jagged,
unyielding thing.
It was more like a verdict.
A sentence he passed on himself.
He would have that.
Not the armor,
maybe-that seemed impossibly distant.
But the thing inside it.
The clean line.
The certainty.
The right to stand tall on clean stones and have your presence mean order,
not blight.
He would have that pride.
He would become something that couldn't be knocked into the mud by a glance.
He would become someone who,
if he ever saw another broken thing on the ground,
could offer a hand without a second thought.
The resolve didn't feel inspiring.
It felt like grabbing a shard of glass and deciding to climb a mountain with it.
It would cut him every step of the way.
But for the first time,
looking up from the mud,
he could see the mountain.
It had a name now.
A knight.
He would become a knight.
It was an insane thought,
so impossible it circled back around to being the only thought that made any sense.
It was an answer,
finally,
to the endless *why*.
Why keep living?
To prove them all wrong.
To take that single shard of unearned kindness and forge it into a weapon he could wield himself.
To wear honor like armor so that no one could ever make him feel like this again.
He sat in the alley filth,
the seed of a vengeful ambition taking root in the barren soil of his life.
It was small,
and hard,
and fueled more by fury at his own humiliation than by any noble ideal.
But it was there.
And for now,
it was enough.
***